January 12, 2007

BlogBuilder Update

Hot on the heels of our previous release, we've released another new version of BlogBuilder this morning with some improvements and new features:

File Uploads

BlogBuilder now allows you to upload any file to your blog and link to it from your entries. This means you can, for example, upload your CV, or a Word Document for a group, or even an MP3 of you and your band playing directly into your blog entries.

The easiest way to do this is when you are creating an entry; in the Textile2 editor click the image next to "To insert a file" - , or from the WYSIWYG editor click the File Picker button - and follow the instructions to either pick a file already uploaded to your blog or to upload one directly into the entry. You can also upload files from the Admin screen for your blog if you go to the Manage Your Files and click "Upload a file" at the top.

For the moment, we're allowing 10MB of upload space per blog to use as you wish (under the Terms and Conditions of Warwick Blogs). Should you require more than this, email us with a request and we can increase your quota.

Improvements to WYSIWYG Editor

There've been a couple of improvements to the WYSIWYG editor:

The style of the editor should now more closely match what your blog looks like (apart from the colours)

We've added buttons for Blockquote, Indent and Outdent to the toolbar that were missing before

It's now possible to easily create an image as a thumbnail to a larger image from the image picker

You can now switch between the Textile and WYSIWYG editors directly from the "Create entry" screen. Please note, you will lose any content changes since the last edit

2 comments by 2 or more people

File uploads: brilliant – I’ve been wanting this for ages, not for my blog (although I can think of a few uses for it already) but for a private team blog. For that use the 10MB will run out very quickly, though. Expect a request soon to increase it:-)

Improvements to the WYSIWIG editor: also brilliant! Swapping editors works as I expected. Preview looks fine. Not tried images yet, but I’m sure they’ll work better too!

I do have one issue. Which editing in the WYSIWYG editor I hit the spell-check button on the Google Toolbar, because that’s what I always used before. It proceeded to highlight spelling mistakes by colouring them red and underlining them. But then it got confused and didn’t undo the formatting when I turned it off, and left it there permanently. The only way I could get rid of it was to edit the raw HTML! I guess if the editor had buttons to set text colour and underlining that would have done the job nicely, but it doesn’t…